The interface of Gamesalad is nice and intuitive, making it easy to drag and drop attributes to create rules quickly. You can easily control music and sounds by changing attribute volumes. However, projects cannot be transferred between Windows and Mac, and settings turned off may turn back on during export. Additionally, precise positioning is difficult without zooming, and timers do not always work reliably. The community provides helpful support through forums and tutorials.

1. Strengths
The interface is very nice and inviting, it doesnʼt take long to get used to it and once you
do you end up spending ages playing with it, the drag and drop UI is very nice and simple
to use, I havenʼt had any problems with it, also the fact that all the attributes are already
there for you to select from is very helpful.
Once I get used to the interface I found my workflow to be faster than most programs I use
as when creating a rule you can type in straight away which attribute you want and it will
come up almost instantly, this makes it easier to transform ideas in your head into actual
coding with Gamesalad quickly while itʼs still fresh in your mind.
You can control the music with the game really well and easily, this is done by using
attributes to change the volume of sounds or music, with the music attribute, also when
one piece of music is playing, when the next start it will stop the other first, but if itʼs a
sound they can overlap, which is quite nice.
It doesnʼt require a high speced computer in order to run, making it easier to run the
software on lower end computers, which is always helpful and convenient.
You can choose whether to preload the graphics or not, this can be helpful depending on
the kind of scene youʼre creating, if it doesnʼt have a lot of graphics at once or the graphics
are small in size you can untick it so the level will load almost instantly, and if there are a
lot of graphics present you can tick preload.
Weaknesses/Problems
One of Gamesaladʼs biggest problems is the inability to move the project from Windows to
a Mac, we tried this a number of times and failed every time, this made it harder to work on
the game as we could only work on it at home.
Another problem is how it wasnʼt really made clear that anything that we had turned off
would actually turn on when exported, which meant we had to go back and delete
everything we had turned off, which was quite a challenge, because of this problem there
may still be something that was turned off in the code which is now turned on and we
wouldnʼt even know it.
Sometimes when I had coded something it seemed like it would work and it wouldnʼt work
for whatever reason and there is really no way to see what is happening behind the
scenes when itʼs running, itʼd be nice to see something like “Now spawning actor ʻBallʼ
running rule...” and so on, but you donʼt get anything like that, which would be useful for
fixing these bugs.
One of the most annoying things in Gamesalad is the fact you cannot zoom in on your
work area, making it hard to put thing in precise locations as you need to move it pixel by
pixel and keep testing to see if it works, rather than just zooming in and getting it into the
right location.
The timer attribute doesnʼt seem to always work 100% of the time, sometimes when
something in theory should work with the timer it doesnʼt for no reason at all, this is
annoying as sometimes I can rely on it to work and other times it just does nothing or does
what I want it to do wrong.
What was good?
Gamesaladʼs community is really good and helpful, there was a few within the project
where I had to post on the forums to get help with something and within a day both times I
got a helpful response detailing what I had to do which is really nice. Also there is a ton of
tutorial videos on YouTube which are insightful and helpful.
Also surprisingly it is a free program which is really nice for anyone who wants to start
coding for video games, it basically teaches you the core things you need to know in order
to begin coding. There is a paid version you can get which allows you to publish it to more
platforms and allows to you make profit from the game.
Gamesalad Evaluation